Description

The complexity of our modern society science, technology,
government, business has become so great that its very existence
is made possible only through correspondingly complex
mechanisms for communication, processing, storage, and retrieval
of information about itself and the results of its functioning. This
may appear to be overly dramatic, yet its truth is demonstrated by
the ever increasing number of information centers, "data-banks,"
centralized files, and special libraries; the evidence for its importance
lies in the ever increasing concern in science, technology,
government, and business that these mechanisms meet their needs
for information. The nature of those needs, wherever they exist, is
that they are relatively ill -defined and represent a great variety of
mutually conflicting requirements. The problem is to meet them
within severe economic restraints, so that the "information system"
does not itself become a burden.
It is this which constitutes the challenge to librarianship, and
all the concerns of the moment with "mechanization," with "centralized
processing," with "economic operation," with "system
analysis
" are merely symptomatic, merely the evidence of the
crying need for professional knowledge of how to meet the demands
for information ill-defined though they are and severe though the
economic restraints may be. Because librarianship does represent
the sole existing source of professional knowledge and operating experience
in the field of information handling as such, it is librarianship
which now feels the pressure of these needs. If librarianship
does not meet this challenge and fill the need for professional knowledge,
someone else will, but in the process they then must develop the
same tools and capabilities which librarianship now provides.

Issue Date:

1964

Publisher:

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.